How Jetpack Can Improve Your WordPress Site’s Search Functionality

You can find almost anything you are looking for on the internet. Whether it is a directory that has details of all restaurants in your local area or recipes to help you cook a particular meal. All these can be found in millions of websites on the internet. In this article, we will look at how Jetpack can improve your WordPress site’s search functionality.

Good web designers usually ensure that visitors can easily find information they are looking for. All WordPress websites come with an in-built search function. The problem is, this search feature makes it difficult to find the right content in websites with many posts.

If you ever experience such a problem, have no worries because Jetpack plugin provides a search functionality that is an offshoot of Elasticsearch engine. The plugin strengthens the original site search by enabling customization and making it faster and more powerful.

Benefits of site search

When you type a term or phrases into a search engine, the first page of the results will show after a few seconds. You will look through the headlines and meta-descriptions and finally click on one site.

This action will take you to the homepage of a website. Let’s say you clicked on a sports website. The website has information on sports such as football, hockey, tennis, rugby and cricket. You want to read about a particular football team. You simply look for the search icon and type the name of that football team and you will get the information.

When setting up a website, make sure that the search function works well and older posts are well organized. This is because users will definitely come across them when conducting a search on your website. Doing this enables visitors to stay much longer on your site because they will read many other posts related to what they were initially searching for.

If you have a website, a simple search functionality is great. If it’s a site that sells products and services, you might want to use more advanced search function. Most business owners usually take note of this when setting up their website. Their goal is to enable visitor easily find that specific product/service they are looking for without much hassle.

For a site that has hundreds of pages of content, you will need more than just the standard search widget. The results that appear after a search are usually imprecise in such sites. In some cases, it takes too long to load, prompting the user to seek information from rival websites.

All that being said, let see how you can use Jetpack to improve your WordPress site’s search functionality.

• Jetpack Elasticsearch’s incredible features

If you have had enough of the WordPress default search and want an alternative, Elasticsearch is your best shot. Aside from allowing you to customize search for your visitors, it comes with many other features. It improves the standard WordPress search in the following ways:

• It organizes results by relevance and date

If you type some keywords into the search box, you expect to see the latest and most relevant content. Using the default search engine may not sort your search results this way. It could take you a couple of minutes to find what you’re looking for.

• Search filters

A filtered search is vital when a user is combing through a website. Let’s say it’s an e-commerce site and there are many products and services to see. Addition of elements such as tags and categories in the search function will be helpful.

• It boosts the latest content

For users going through a website, there are high chances that they are looking for the latest content. Jetpack plugin favours recent content and will give it prominence over older posts.

• Elasticsearch API

Elasticsearch API has features that allow webmasters to make more search customizations.

• Supports more documents

The size of the website doesn’t matter as it supports millions of documents.

• Real time indexing

The indexing of new and updated content usually takes seconds. With WordPress default search, it takes long to index. If you’ve just installed Jetpack, it could take a few minutes/hours to index. After that, the process only takes a few seconds.  

• Displays related posts

When visitors are at a particular website, they have to search for content that doesn’t appear on the homepage. In some cases, however, they do not need to do this. Once they have opened a post, they can see a list of related posts.

Jetpack allows the reader to see other content similar to what they’ve been reading. The links to these posts usually appear at the bottom of a post. This feature is just like the search function, only that visitors don’t have to type phrases into the search box. This feature is highly effective as it enables users to spend more time at a site.

• Speeds up load time

Google algorithms favour websites which load faster. Internet users will always move on to the next website if a site they’ve opened takes more than a few seconds to load. This is understandable because there are probably hundreds of other sites that offer the same content.

Jetpack is instrumental in speeding up the load time of a site. This is especially helpful to webmasters who use SEO methods to rank higher and improve their sites’ conversion rates. The image content delivery network (CDN) feature hosts images for your site and enables it to load faster.

• Conclusion

Jetpack also enhances a website in so many other ways such as: automated content sharing, effortless website management, availing traffic statistics and protecting a site against brute force attacks. If you want to increase the visibility of your site and in the process increase conversion rates, installing the Jetpack plugin is crucial.

 As we have seen earlier in the post, a good site should enable a visitor to find information easily. When they can quickly find what they are looking for, nothing will keep them from coming back. Jetpack should definitely be on your plans if you’re looking to improve your WordPress site’s search functionality.